The Ballerina, Her Mother And The Genteel Art of Forgery.

* This story is perhaps my most obscure yet. But the idea of  a genteel daughter of the Anglo-Irish peerage pulling off one of the most brazen art-frauds of the early 20th century appeals to me. Also, the fact that her daughter was the great, ferocious Doyenne of modern English ballet - Dame Ninette De Valois also adds a bit of colour. I really think Ealing Studios, or perhaps P.G. Woodehouse could have had a lot of fun with this one .........

* The gentlemen of Sotheby's Auction House on New Bond Street in London were in something of a pickle.

They had been consigned one of the greatest collections of antique Irish and British glass ever put together, the famous Harding Collection, for sale in their venerable auction rooms.

Ninette - 1925

But the collection of 17th and 18th century glass, previously estimated to be worth in the region of £16,000 (just over £1m in today's money) had failed to generate any excitement amongst the buyers. In fact, the Harding Collection was under something of a cloud. There had been whispers in the showrooms on New Bond street, dark mutterings about pedigree and provenance. Some had even gone so far as to utter the one word that could send a shiver of fear through the genteel staff of the world's greatest auction house, a business which had traded on its impeccable reputation since 1744.

That one word? "Fake!"

There was a huge sum of money on the line. The reputation of the great auction house, the ridicule facing a gullible, sadly departed philanthropist and millionaire. There was also the scandal that could wreck the career of the greatest ballerina and choreographer of the age, the fierce Irish dancer who had starred under Diaghilev at the Ballets Russes, worked with WB Yeats at the Abbey in Dublin and charmed the British Royals.

Dame Ninette de Valois was about to create one of the great dance dynasties, the company that would become The Royal Ballet. But in the early 1930s, one lady could still wreck all of that.

And that lady was her mother.

Elizabeth (Lilith) Graydon-Stannus, born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy at a country house in Lacken, Co Wicklow in 1876 was an artist, entrepreneur and star of the British Art-Deco movement. She had become an expert in highly-collectible antique Irish glassware, established her own glass-works in amongst the post-war bohemians of Battersea in London and watched her daughter Ninette become one of the most celebrated prima-ballerinas and choreographers in the world. Ninette had changed her name from Edris Stannus to the more French sounding Ninette de Valois when she made her professional debut in London in 1911. Aged 13.

Ninette Aged 16 - Already a Seasoned Pro

 Ninette was a child prodigy. But also fiercely determined. She went from child dancer to prima-ballerina to Godmother of British dance through the 20th century. The Irish woman made a star of Fonteyn and sensationally brought Nureyev to London.

Her mother Lilith was, if one contemporary is to be believed; ""The greatest villain in the manipulation of the history of Irish Glass". 

Ms Graydon-Stannus might have begged to differ.

To her mind, she was not copying or faking rare and highly valuable antique glass - heaven forfend! She was merely "creating" and "improving".

Or as she once declared herself; "My endeavour is to create. Not to copy!"

And if the buyer, usually very rich but perhaps not expert collectors, were under the impression that they were actually paying for the real thing, well, these things happen, darling!

What Elizabeth Stannus did - as far as we can tell - was mix straight up forgery with very clever and sophisticated "reproduction" and "improving".

In some cases, she would take genuine old Irish glass pieces - decanters, goblets, etc - and "improve" them by getting her highly skilled workmen to do additional engraving and cutting, turning a commonplace, boring piece of glass worth £10 into a rare jewel worth £100.

Or, she would find old moulds, the ones used to produce the original pieces, and use them to churn out scores of new-old copies.

Elizabeth even went so far as to melt down old Irish glass to use its unique look and qualities to create highly convincing "reproductions" (even if that particular word was nowhere to be seen on the label).

It was clever, sophisticated and totally against the rules of the antiques business. It was fraud.

The real kicker is that Graydon-Stannus was something of a great artist herself - her highly colourful, beautifully designed Art-Deco pieces were very popular in their day and are hugely desirable to collectors today (look for the Gray-Stan mark in your local junk-shop).

She could produce modern classics - but she also had the skills and the, er, nerve to copy, fake and fool. And in her marvellously genteel way, charming the American visitors to London, hob-knobbing with the artistic elite of 1920s London, she set out to rake in the cash.

There has also been speculation that Lilith didn't stop at forging Irish antiques - she may have also tried her hand at famous contemporary names such as Lalique.

Strangely, it was the lady herself who gave the game away. In a speech to the Royal Society of Arts in 1926, she vehemently rejected growing claims that she was faking. But admitted that she owned old Irish moulds and had been working on reproducing the look and design of Old Irish Glass.

Lilith had literally written the book on Old Irish Glass - her handbook of that title had been considered at the time to be the bible on the subject, but today, the copy in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford has a sticker on the front that says; "Use With Caution! Contains Many Factual Errors!"

The errors contained inside are mostly images and drawings of old Irish glass pieces, that had either been hacked-about or "created" by the lady herself.

Her reputation went into sharp decline. But it was too late for well-heeled buyers like Walter Harding, who visited her shop in Battersea in the 1920s and bought up almost her entire stock of "Old" Irish pieces.

When Harding - a millionaire philanthropist from Liverpool - died in the mid-1930s, his collection came up for sale in Sotheby's in London. Expected to fetch at least what he had paid for it, £16,000 (or almost £1m in today's money) - it sold for just £900 (£57k). Word about Elizabeth and her creative ways had obviously got around.

It should have been a huge scandal, perhaps resulting in legal action. Curiously, it was not. Some have speculated that her daughter Ninette - using her connections at the very top of British society - had the affair hushed up. There were rumours of some of the more irate customers being paid off, of favours being called in and mother being quietly packed off down the country.

The affair quickly died down. Sotheby's went on making money, Ninette went on building her Ballet empire and Lilith? Well, she is accused of many things, including creating such a mess of the history of Antique Irish Glass that many of her fakes may still be doing the rounds as the real thing.

But where's the harm? After all, new, old, fake or "improved", aren't they all simply lovely things?

Now, would you be interested in a lovely Jacobean wine goblet, at all? Fresh in from a gorgeous old Irish house..... so perfect! It looks as if it could have been made yesterday, darling!

**HEY! THANKS FOR READING!******* And by the way, if anybody is interesting in paying me to make a doc/write further about this, I will work for food. Also, antique glassware.

Easter 1916 - The Gorgeous Wrecks & The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland.

* This is a piece I wrote for the Irish Independent newspaper - a personal take on the events of 1916 - the Easter Rising or Rebellion that hit loyal, peaceful Dublin like a thunderclap on a sunny Easter Weekend. I learnt about it in school - at the hands (and sometimes fists) of the Christian Brothers. But in recent years, I have tried to approach the events from a different angle.......

Captain Jack White - Free Lovin' Irish Revolutionary 

 * The Christian Brothers who taught me about Irish history presented Easter, 1916 as a heroic epic, the founding myth of our Republic.

They were muscular men, a generation or so on from the Rising, the War of Independence and our brutal Civil War, the latter being a subject that was still too raw to even mention in the classrooms of Cork in the 1980s.

They revered Pádraig Pearse, a teacher and strict disciplinarian after their own hearts, and believed in his doctrine of blood sacrifice, linking it to the men of 1798 and even further back to our original muscular Christian, brave, martyred Brian Boru.

Brian Boru - the High King of Ireland and scourge of the Vikings! - was presented in the same way we learnt about the early Christian martyrs, the Roman Legionnaires put to death for refusing to chuck their fellow Christians to the lions. 

In many ways, in their admiration for Pearse and mania for discipline, they were the paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church.

To my young, over-active imagination, Pearse was a cross between the hot-tempered Brother who tried to “bate” Irish into us and John Wayne at the Alamo, running his young volunteers through the tuiseal ginideach even as he fired his rifle from the burning wreck of the GPO.

In our homes, Michael Collins was revered, his portrait hanging alongside a picture of John F Kennedy and the Pope, Cork’s own Blessed Holy Trinity. DeValera was mentioned only in dark whispers, a bogey-man.

The events of 1916 didn’t seem real to us, even though they happened when our grandfathers were alive. And there was no connection made to the Troubles, to the nightly news reports about the Hunger Strikers, names such as Bobby Sands, heard as we sat around the table for our tea.

It is only in recent years, having gone back and looked at the events of 1916 for myself, that I have been able to find a way into the Easter Rising via some of the small, forgotten stories behind the Great Myth.

As a history nut, and having written a book about long forgotten Irish men who did everything from run the French slave trade to invading Imperial China, I see the small stories of individual men and women as a valuable way to approach Great Events from a different angle.

And 1916 has a wealth of small stories which can give us a sense of what it must have been like to live through those times, the sudden chaos, the trauma and the conflicting emotions and loyalties.

(The video below is only six minutes long and sets the scene well.)

One episode, a tragic side-show to the doomed struggle on O’Connell Street, gives us a striking picture of the confusion and tragedy of Dublin, Easter 1916.

It is the story of The Gorgeous Wrecks, how, on Easter Monday, April 24, a small party of volunteers occupying Clanwilliam House by Mount Street Bridge fired on a detachment of Home Defence Force volunteers.

The Home Defence men were a sort of Dad’s Army, mostly elderly Dubliners, loyalists, veterans of the British army and colonial wars. They wore armbands with the inscription “Georgious Rex” (King George) and their creaky, grey-haired ranks were known affectionately to Dubliners as “The Gorgeous Wrecks”.

The Wrecks had been out on an Easter Monday parade in full uniform and just stumbled into the volunteer strong-point. The 17 volunteers in Clanwilliam house opened fire, killing four of the Wrecks and wounding others before they realised, to what some later said was their horror, that these were not British Army regulars, but the Dad’s Army that Dubliners were accustomed to seeing parading on high-days and holidays. The jolly old Gorgeous Wrecks.

We could hardly find a better snapshot of a peaceful, loyal city of the Empire suddenly overwhelmed by sudden, shocking violence and confusion.

I am also drawn to the story of The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland.

The Bullet Still In the Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland

This bat – now in the National History Museum – was in the shop window of Elvery's Sports in Sackville Street when it stopped a bullet from a British gun (the spent bullet still lodged in the bat is a .303). To me, this strange, very Anglo-Irish memento vividly represents the destruction and chaos of the Rising.

Contemporary accounts tell of street urchins looting bats, balls, lacrosse sticks and polo mallets from Elvery's and parading them like trophies around the edges of the fighting. One of the many surreal sights of a battle being fought in the heart of a busy, mercantile city.

Recently, I also came across the story of Captain Jack White, the son of an Ulster-born British Field Marshall and a decorated hero of the British Army himself.

Jack followed a strange path from Winchester Public School and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, fighting in the Boer War and then throwing in his commission to embrace radical socialism, free-love and the cause of Ireland.

It was White who brought his military experience to organising The Citizen’s Army. 

He did not fight in 1916 but when he heard his great friend James Connolly would be shot, he tried to organise the Miners of South Wales to come out on strike to put pressure on the British Government to commute the sentence.

White, who later went on to fight for the Republicans in Spain, battled sectarianism at home and tried to organise a socialist party in Ulster, was (in his own words) a miss-fit, one of the many men and women who saw the ideals of Connolly and brotherhood turn to dust in the years after 1916.

In the stories of Jack White, The Gorgeous Wrecks and the Elvery’s Cricket Bat, we can see past the epic myth, the cold revisionism and the strange, current need to treat 

Easter 1916 as some sort of profound, teachable lesson for modern Ireland.

Thanks to the internet and the great efforts of historians (academic and amateur) to put a wealth of history online, we can all now go back and look at the events of 1916, and look at the people and smaller events that never made the history books or the heroic myth.

These are the stories that I would tell about The Rising.

*** You can read more about the cricket bat Here - an excellent blog about its history and significance. 

**** HEY THANKS FOR READING**** 

The Pursuit of Happiness -The O'Shea Institute of Sociological Spoofery Comes Out On Gay Marriage.

* Everybody else has a Same Sex Marriage Referendum Blog. So Why Can't I?

"Is That A Girl or a Boy?" 

* Around the time I was leaving school and leaving home, two people that I knew took their own lives.

One was a middle-aged man, a friend of the family. The other was a young guy in my peer group, somebody I knew from around town, a quiet, friendly guy I would see at music gigs.

By the time it happened, I was already gone from my small city on the south coast. It was only years later that I really thought about what happened, and realised that both these men (well, one almost a boy) had almost certainly been gay. And they had looked at their lives in late 1980s Ireland and decided that they were not worth living.

But it was never talked about. Their deaths, the reasons behind them, the existence of gay people in our lives. I only really knew one Gay guy in our entire city. I hung out with him (shared an unhealthy obsession with The Smiths), but we never talked about why he, every weekend, he had to fight some twisted bastards who saw the blue streak in his hair, his clothes, his manner, and tried to pound him into the ground. I didn't really know how to talk about it and I think he didn't want to take the risk that I would stop being his friend. Around the time I left, he left too. Went to London to try and make a life.

It just wasn't talked about. It was never mentioned on the radio, on TV, in the newspapers. The first time I vaguely became aware of "otherness" was seeing Boy George And Culture Club on Top of the Pops and hearing my dad, like millions of other dads who witnessed the strangeness of that apparition, splutter; "Jesus Christ, is that Queerhawk a boy or a girl?".

It was only later that I found out that Boy George was working-class London-Irish. And as tough as that particular breed of people comes. Tough because he had to be.

My parents grew up in a cold, grey, utterly repressed and terrifying Ireland. I only found out recently that a Great Aunt, who helped to raise us, was forced to give up two children of her own because she was not married to the man she loved. They literally took the children from her in the hospital. Years later, she plucked up the courage to track down one of her daughters. When she went to her house, she had the door closed in her face. The shame was still there. On and on it went, down the generations. Those who could, left. Many who stayed endured misery and a kind of madness. Many - gay, straight, whatever, self-medicated via alcohol.

Ireland was a strange, cold place for so many. In 1990, in one of my first interviews as a student journalist, I talked to Richard Branson, who had shocked the country by offering condoms for sale over the counter at his Virgin Megastore in Dublin. Seriously, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, you basically couldn't buy condoms in Ireland unless you had a letter from your priest/doctor. Richard Branson is a polite, media-savvy man. But you could see he just wanted to shout; "What the F**K is WRONG with you people?"

For most of the '90s, I worked in a newspaper industry in Dublin that apparently employed no Gay men and women. Not one. LGBT people were invisible. Non-people.

David Norris. A Brave Human Being. And Great Craic. 

Homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland until 1993. It took the European Court of Rights and the fearless campaigning of a great Irishman called David Norris to force the Government to decriminalise it.

As recently as 2002, the newspaper I was working for had a front page "splash" - with Government Minister Brendan Howlin declaring; "I'm Not Gay!". There had been a whispering campaign against this popular politician, one which some say cost him the leadership of his party. So he felt he had to say it.

So on May 22nd, my country votes on Same Sex Marriage. The polls suggest the referendum should pass, though some are worried about the Irish habit of saying one thing to the pollsters and doing another in the voting booth. And there's Donegal, of course. Going on past form, Donegal may take the chance to bring back the death penalty or vote us into the Russian Federation.

Can't Argue With That 

But the vote is still very much in the balance.

There has been a loud, sometimes strange, often hysterical campaign against granting this basic civil right to Irish men and women. The veteran and respected journalist Bruce Arnold this week said we shouldn't vote Yes because we feel sorry for gay people.

Let that one sink in for a moment. "Banish your empathy, people of Ireland! It is merely a weakness of the flesh!"

The Catholic Church, once the power in the land, now grimly marching towards some dark, obscure place, says No.

The self-appointed experts say Say Same Sex Marriage will destroy the fabric of Irish society, lead to child abuse, compulsory gay adoption, cloning, cataclysmic genetic experiments in Leitrim, brother marrying sister and plumber marrying florist. Your basic frogs, blood and Elton John albums raining from the sky, scenario.

The arguments against Gay Marriage have mostly been high, wild and crazy. And have been shouted endlessly on the airwaves and in print by a class of people who up until very recently had total control of our society and yet now claim (in their newspaper columns and on endless TV and radio appearances) that they are a persecuted minority without a voice.

One leading politician and Noted Idiot said this weekend past that he was against Gay Marriage as he didn't want "any Elton John scenarios". We'll leave that one to future historians to work out.

What they are really saying - actually, screaming - is; "We are terrified. We once ruled this land. We imposed our morality on a cowed people. And now they are turning their backs on us, on Mother Church, on the old ways. We have lost our power."

Divorce didn't destroy the fabric of our society. Allowing gay men and women to live out in the open without fear of criminal prosecution didn't destroy our country. Giving them the same rights to marriage as enjoyed by the rest of the country won't either. You really would have to be in full flight from reality to think otherwise.

Rock On, Bishop Michael Burrows

Some people of faith have stood up for the Yes side. Church of Ireland Bishop Michael Burrows has said; " 'The rights of gay people have become, very properly, the great justice issue of our time just as the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women were in the past'.

Of course, being a Godless Protestant, he would say that. 

So I think back to those two human beings that took their own lives that year I left school. And the countless lives that were lived in misery, fear and waste because the Catholic Church and others has had such a bizarre obession/problem with human sexuality. With love, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Y'know, your basic Christian-values stuff.

I think Ireland has changed greatly. Since Gay people have been allowed to live openly amongst us, the famous, probably mythical block known as "Middle Ireland" has seen them for what they are. Brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours, sons, daughters, barmen, brickies, politicians and cab-drivers.

I think most people see same sex marriage for what it is. A basic civil rights issue. And more importantly, a Happiness Issue. We want our friends, neighbours and family to have that chance of being happy.

I think we will vote Yes with a significant majority on May 22nd because most Irish people will look at the real issues with clear eyes and decide it is the right thing to do. The human thing to do. And yes, the Christian thing to do.  

So hopefully, we will choose happiness. Knowing we were mired in misery for too bloody long. 

One final question - how could any country that loves the Eurovision soooo much (and guys, that's another thing we need to talk about), possibly vote against Same Sex Marriage? 

Think about it, people. And VOTE! 

***HEY, thanks for reading!*** 

In Deepest Yemen - With The Heavily-Armed Hamsters

* A Few Years Ago......I went to Yemen by mistake. 

It may sound strange, but at the time I was writing travel pieces (still do, available for hire, cross my palm with silver). But being a freelancer, I was at the bottom of the pile when it came to press trips. 

There were three kind of travel junkets in newspapers. The first, were the ones you never heard about. You would just realise that somebody got a free fortnight in the Bahamas or Australia when the news-editor turned up after a being off with a deep tan. In January. The second, the week in Spain or Italy, went to the staffers. The third, the Weird Ones, went to us freelancers.

Yemen At Bottom Of Map

And so it was that I ended up going to Yemen. A place that is now in the news thanks to tragic events. The Iranians and the Saudis have joined in an already volatile situation - bombing and killing in a bid to find out which version of Early Medieval mysticism is the correct one.

And every time I hear about the conflict there, my heart sinks a little - because going to Yemen was an amazing  if accidental experience.

I took the trip on a last-minute, "Yeah, Sure why not?".

It was the weirdest place I have ever been too (and I talk as somebody who once bounced around the highlands of Uganda and Rwanda for ten days. AND trekked thru deepest Leitrim). But it was ....stunning, other-worldly. In parts, it was as if we stepped out of our Toyota Jeep and straight into the 13th century. 

And I did drugs with heavily-armed hamsters. AK47s and all. Talk about an Idiot Abroad.....

Me With My Bros - Highlands of Yemen

'You're going WHERE?" It was the standard and understandable response when I told people I was about to go to Yemen for some sight-seeing. There are places where we go on holiday (Spain, France, Italy), places we go travelling (Peru, Vietnam and Tibet) and places which, for even the most committed global wanderers, are fated to remain forever off the map. Yemen was definitely one of those places for me. The only thing I knew about it was that it was somewhere near Somalia (in the news then because of recent piracy in the Arabian sea) and Chandler from Friends once had to go there in a bid to escape from his annoyingly-voiced girlfriend, Janice. Also! Bonus Strange Yemen fact, English comedian Eddie Izzard was born there.

A quick Google later and that vast caché of knowledge had expanded to include: where it is (at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula underneath Saudi Arabia); some economic facts (very little oil, poorest state in the Gulf region); and a little bit of history. Yemen was the land of the Biblical Queen of Sheba (one of the rulers of the ancient Sabaean Kingdom) and was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, or 'Happy Arabia', because of the riches generated by the spice and incense trade.

The Republic of Yemen is slightly smaller than France, has a rapidly expanding population of around 21 million, and many of them are daily users of a narcotic plant called Qat (more of which later). Yet even knowing all of this this could not have prepared ne for the culture shock of landing in the ancient capital Sana'a at 7am on a Saturday after a 12-hour flight via Cairo, or the hypnotic calls to prayer of the muezzins bouncing off the mudbrick high-rises.

An old Yemani Royal Palace - Made Out of Marzipan. 

It's one of the weird side-effects of 21st-century travelling. You leave your familiar surroundings in Dublin one grey morning and within half a day, you are standing, bewildered, in the middle of a crowd scene from Arabian Nights as women in full-length black sharshafs shove past you, with only their dark eyes showing through narrow slots in their veils. Sana'a itself, once you start to get your head around it, is a lofty 2,000m above sea level and appears, at first glance, to be the capital of one of the dustier planets from Star Wars (especially when the moon looms hugely out of the high desert sky). Five or six-storey mud brick buildings, with roofs and floor levels picked out in black, white or red stone and whitewash framed arabesque stained-glass windows, crowd inside ancient walls.

The Capital Sann'a - Mud-brick Sky-Rise

Like much of the rest of the country, it's dusty and crowded, weird and wonderful, and incredibly beautiful all at the same time. The Yemeni tourism ministry had arranged for a driver and a guide to meet myself and my two travelling companions, a young Englishman and a fiftysomething Englishwoman with a lot of experience of the Middle East.

"Hello, where are you from?" (the standard question from all Yemenis and one that we would hear at least 20 times a day over the coming week, there not being a lot of foreigners around). When we informed our guide, a local man who had lived in Canada, that we were "one Irlanda and two English", he made an executive decision. "It's better if you say you are all from Ireland -- too many questions about Bush and Blair," he said. Score one for the former colonies (Irish and Yemeni) and a week of stiff upper lip declarations of Gaeldom from my English travelling companions.

Of course, the fact that Yemen has long been on the British Foreign Office list of countries you should not travel to -- under the reassuring headings of 'Terrorism', 'Kidnapping' and 'Hostages' -- may have also informed our guide's advice. At the time we visited, there had been several incidences of tourist kidnappings. And botched rescue attempts by the Yemeni army. There was a long list of incidents such as the one in July, 2007, when eight Spanish and two Yemeni nationals were killed and a number of others injured in a suicide bomb attack in Ma'rib, 100km east of Sana'a. We could only travel outside Sana'a, with an official guide and, every 100km or so, there are army checkpoints that record your passing through and inform the next checkpoint down the line when to expect you. "If we don't show up in a couple of hours, then they will come looking for us," explained the guide, with the nonchalance of a man who was never going to be suspected of being a close personal friend of George W Bush..

Within hours of landing in Sana'a, we were going through our first checkpoint as we began our long climb up into the Haraz mountains. And after the exotic otherness of the ancient capital, this was where the great secret of Yemen was revealed. While the east of Yemen is classic Arabian desert, the western half is spectacularly, jaw-droppingly beautiful mountain country. We climbed from a high desert plateau into endless jagged mountain ranges, with every mountain top and foreboding rock crowned with a heavily fortified village that appeared to be made out of blocks of marzipan. Every mountainside is terraced in the style that would be familiar to people who have travelled through the former Inca empire in Peru. At the top of each mound rising above us were yet more impossibly beautiful castles in the air under milky-blue, Alpine skies.

The Village of Al Hajjara - very typical of mountaintop villages in Yemen

Our four days in the mountains went roughly like this: get up at 6am for breakfast, climb into the Land Cruiser, drive vertically for six hours (stopping off for lunch in fly-blown mountain villages), walk for two hours from one village to another over knife-edge ridges, then find a ramshackle guest house for an evening meal and bed. The hotels/guest houses were mostly primitive, but usually clean and very welcoming.

There were some hitches. At the mountain village of Manakha, the four brothers who owned the local hotel we stayed in played music and performed a traditional dance while we sat cross-legged on the floor eating rice, flatbread and spicy goat meat (which I love). There was a collection of dusty old rifles in the corner. I picked one up (an ancient British Lee Enfield), thinking it was an ornament. When I pulled back the bolt, I saw the live round in the chamber. My shock produced a few laughs from our hosts.

Yemani Man With Jambiyya - Pic BY Ashley Jonathan Clements

Now, no man in Yemen is ever seen without his traditional J-shaped Jambiyya dagger in his belt, in the way that our granddads would have never gone outside the door without their caps. And the traditional dance performed for us that night was, as far as I could make out, the famed 'Brandishing the Fearsome Daggers Under the Noses of the Terrified Tourists Dance'. But in a country where you regularly see guys wandering around the markets with AK47s, it wasn't that scary -- at least not until they picked up their rifles for the big finale. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured and when midnight came, we retired to our bedrooms on the third floor.

And that was when the fun began. As well as the knives and guns, most males in Yemen spend virtually every afternoon chewing Qat, a mountain bush that apparently has mild cocaine-like affects. It's chewed like tobacco, which makes the men, chawing on huge wads of green leaves in their cheek pouches, look like heavily armed hamsters. I actually tried some with the Homicidal Manaka Brothers, sat in the room with about 14 guys chewing away for a while. And all it did was keep me awake for 48 hours. Which would prove to be a bit of a problem. Late that night, as we settled down to sleep, our armed and by now drug-addled hosts decided to put a fourth floor on the hotel, using a cement mixer, pneumatic drills and hammers. At about 4am, my fourth attempt to get them to stop saw me come as close as I ever want to be to starting a knife-fight with a tooled-up, drug-crazed dance troupe. I was standing there in my shorts, screaming threats at any man who picked up a drill. Remarkably fool-hardy given they had a stack of AKs next to the shovels.

All very colourful (and true, I swear), but not representative of a country where I always felt safe and the people were gentle, friendly and delighted to meet foreigners.

But there is a reason that people still live on the highest rock of the highest mountain. And men often carry around automatic rifles. A reason that we have been reminded of in the past couple of weeks, with the Saudis and Iranians (and all the rest of the neighbours) joining in the civil war to fight a proxy, sectarian war. The utter bastards.

So now Yemen is about bombs and terrorism. But when I see the headlines, I remember how, when I went into the highlands, a pocketful of cheap pens (the man from the tourist ministry told us to buy some in the capital) would win lots of smiles and Kodak moments from the kids who popped up from behind every boulder and wall.

Down With The Kids In Yemen

Unfortunately for those kids, Yemen was in no way ready for mass tourism in the way that, say, Dubai had established itself.  Despite having all of the scenery, history and culture that Dubai lacks.

Yemen is now a country in agony. And it makes me sad. Because it is just so unbelievably beautiful and interesting. 

It should be a world class travel destination. It is a dream location for mountain trekking, wild, spectacular, friendly and almost totally deserted. And in a world of increasingly jaded travellers, Yemen could be that rare beast, an unspoilt, unexplored desert and mountain paradise, travel Nirvana for the truly adventurous.

Or course, this is an outsider speaking. What really matters to the people there now is peace and stability. I hope they get it.

*Hey! Thanks for reading* 

Perkin Warbeck - The Male Model Who Fought A Tudor King

* This is a quirky story from history that has long intrigued me, partly because the outlandish plot to usurp the first Tudor King of England was hatched in my home-town, the southern Irish port city of Cork. It's also the real reason why Cork is still called "The Rebel City", a title that has nothing to do (as most people think) with Michael Collins and the 20th century fight for Irish independence. In fact, the title is not so much about Michael Collins as Derek Zoolander.

"some dudes brainwashed Derek to off the prime minister of Micronesia!"

It's a strange one - the tale of a late medieval male model who suddenly found himself thrust into centre-stage in the European power-politics of the day. It's the story of a charismatic, foolish young man who found out there was more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good-looking.

Perkin - The Tudor Zoolander 

* In the autumn of 1491, a Flemish merchant's ship docked in the southern Irish port of Cork. The city had been welcoming trade from the continent for centuries and the small ship, loaded with fine silks, furs and other luxury goods, would not have excited much comment. 

On board was a Breton silk-merchant called Pierre Jean Meno and his young apprentice, the son of a poor but respectable burgess of Tournai called Jehan de Werbecque. The apprentice was 17-year-old Perkin Werbecque.

These were turbulent times in Ireland, Britain and beyond. Ireland was still a stronghold of the York family, who had been defeated by the Plantagenets in the recent, insanely complicated dynastic struggle known to us as the Wars of The Roses (My kingdom for a horse, and all that).

The Wars of The Roses - Florist Against Florist

The Yorkists still believed they could take back the crown from the usurper Henry VII (father of Henry VIII of...er...Wolf Hall fame). But they lacked a candidate to unite around, the York family men being prone to having large steel blades inserted into various parts of their bodies.

Edward & Richard - The Royal Brothers Who Disappeared In The Tower

Henry VII was the first Tudor monarch, having invaded from France and seized the throne from the Plantagenet King Richard III (whose body was recently found under a car-park in Leicester) who in turn had taken it from the 12-year-old Edward V, one of the two Princes In The Tower, who had disappeared while being "protected" by Richard in the Tower of London (try to keep up).

So! Confused times. And into this, or at least into the small port of Cork, many miles across the sea from London, walked the handsome young apprentice, Perkin Warbeck. 

His job, while in Cork, was to be a sort of Male Model. He would don his master's finest silk clothes, stroll about the town and basically act as a human mannequin, telling those who asked where they could find the merchant with the exquisite cloth. 

And Perkin was, by all accounts, a handsome and charismatic kid. So charismatic, that the rumour soon went around the city that this beautiful, finely dressed young man with a funny accent must be an aristocrat. In fact, as the whole of Cork was soon saying, he was really the Earl of Warwick, one of the many missing Yorkist noblemen with a claim to the Crown Of England, Wales and Ireland!

Sure, he didn't exactly speak English. But look at those clothes! That fine face and noble carriage! He HAD to be a nobleman!

As the tumult went up and the mob gathered, Perkin denied that he was the Earl. No, he was in fact....Richard, Duke of York, one of the disappeared "Princes In The Tower" and the one true King!

Historians have long argued how, exactly, Perkin pulled this one out of his silk-clad arse (although they tend to dress up the language a bit). Was he a foolish young man, who knew all of the stories about the tragic Princes which had scandalised Europe, and gotten a little carried away with all the attention? Or had he been sent by the French king to ferment trouble for the current King of England, whose grasp on the crown was shaky at best?

But whatever the reason - this was SENSATIONAL! The Duke of York, in Cork! The streets ran wild with Yorkist sentiment. 

Cork had some previous in the Pretender Game. Just a few years earlier they had welcomed another unlikely claimant to the Throne of England, a young man called Lambert Simnell, who had arrived in Cork, was proclaimed Earl Of Warwick (who apparently made more comebacks than Sinatra) and managed to lead a rebellion into England which was finally defeated in battle, but not before Henry VII had gotten quite the shock. 

For the vocal support of both Simnell and Warbeck, Cork would be dubbed a "Rebel City" by King Henry VII, a moniker that has stuck to this day. 

Having seen Simnell come a cropper, the people and city fathers of Cork were a little less hasty when it came to Warbeck. He was given a bit of a party and then sent on his way back to France with plenty of "Good luck to ye now, and if it all works out well with the whole Claiming the Crown thing, make sure to get back to us!". 

The French King Charles VIII did welcome Warbeck/Richard and - together with Margaret of Burgundy - backed his claim. Further headaches came for Henry VII when the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian (the real Big Cheese) also recognised the good-looking guy in silk. 

It looked like serious trouble for Henry. But he was a smart operator with a very good spy network in Europe who informed him of two salient facts. Firstly, the support for Warbeck amongst his kingly rivals was luke-warm at best. And secondly, Emperor Max had money problems and his attention on Italy. 

Henry wisely bided his time. When Warbeck and his small band of supporters tried to invade England at Deal in 1485, it turned into a fiasco and Warbeck was forced to sail first to Ireland and then to Scotland to try and find a safe haven and regroup.

In August 1497, after more adventures and another failed attempt at invasion, he was persuaded to give himself up at an Abbey in England, where he had tried to claim sanctuary. 

Henry was remarkably lenient with the young man, keeping him at court so he could keep an eye on him. But after he tried to run away several times, the King's patience ran out and Perkin was tried and executed in London on November 23rd, 1499. He was 28.

At best, Perkin Warbeck was just the dupe of powerful men involved in the long-running dynastic squabbles of the era. They said he went to his death with dignity. And dressed in a simple white linen smock. 

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Jesus Was A Crossmaker - The Sad Ballad of Judee Sill

* Back, way back, when people still bought CDs, I was in Tower Records in Dublin, passing a bit of time when I came across a double album on sale. It was a reissue - The Judee Sill Collection. I'd never heard the name (and the spelling was a bit strange) and the picture of the waif-like woman on the cover, wearing what looked like National Health Glasses, didn't promise a lot. But, curiosity piqued, I stumped up the five bucks and brought it home for a listen....

Judee Sill 

* It might be a bit unfair to call Judee Sill a forgotten singer-songwriter, as a small but fiercely devoted band of fans still keep the flame burning.

But Sill, who had a sad, strange life and recorded some beautiful, haunting, playful, inventive music through her tumultuous time, is not a name you hear very often these days.

Sill is often described as looking like a librarian. Her voice was quiet and fragile yet powerful. And her lyrics are often inscrutable, or at least Dylan-esque in their complexity and depths. The music was heavily influenced by Bach. The vocals were often layered and over-dubbed - her own voice, on top of itself several times. It's early 1970s, woman singer-songwriter, but very orchestral, complex and lush.

The clip down below - of her singing The Kiss - might remind you of other folk-influenced female singer-songwriters of the early '70s. But you can't say it's typical, not when you listen to something as upbeat and playful as perhaps her best known songs, like Jesus Was A Crossmaker or Crayon Angels.

Her voice is incredibly warm and affecting, quietly optimistic. Which is something given her struggles through life.

She was signed to the Asylum label in the early 1970s - the label that David Geffen would use to launch the careers of the greatest singer-songwriters of the era.

But Sill only recorded two albums (now considered lost classics) before addiction, mental illness and a terrible series of bad choices took their toll.

Sill was a chronic heroin addict from her late teens. And had a string of arrests, including several for prostitution and armed robberies of convenience stores in Ventura, California, before she was into her early twenties.

"I did heroin with gusto because I wanted to escape my torment and misery,' she told Rolling Stone in 1972 of her three-year addiction. 'But then I figured if could maintain that kind of habit that long, the willpower I'd need to kick it would be a cinch.'  

She did kick heroin - but that was only one of the many problems which threatened to derail her life and constantly thwarted her attempts to build a career.

Sill was bisexual - and also had a talent for finding the worst men possible (for her at least) going through a string of co-dependent, drug-addled relationships and marriages, all before she briefly tasted success as an Asylum recording artist.

Her childhood was pretty chaotic - her dad, Millford Sill was, variously, an importer of exotic animals for movie work, part-time bar owner and full-time drinker. Sill grew up in her father's bar, and when he died early in her life, her mother married an animator best known for working on Tom & Jerry cartoons. It was a chaotic, bohemian, substance-driven. Her father, brother and mother all died when she was still in her teens.

However, she kept a strong sense of faith and spirituality throughout her life - sometimes saying that she wrote songs that "were aimed at persuading Jesus to give people a break".

By the time she died from drug abuse in 1979, she had long been forgotten. Her once intense relationship with David Geffen broken, which left her very bitter about the music industry.

Judee Sill could have been a Joni Mitchell, today she is not even a Nick Drake - another fragile singer-songwriter of the era who died tragically young but is today revered.

Few people really remember Judee Sill, which is a great shame, as she had a kind of genius.

I would heartily recommend checking out her two released albums and the collection of recorded but not released in her lifetime songs.

Also - there's a very good BBC4 radio doc about her - which you can listen to by clicking on above.

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Danno O'Mahony - Champion of The World

Some Man - Danno O'Mahoney

* For a time in the mid-1930s, Danno O'Mahony was arguably the most famous Irishman in the world. And he was certainly one of the few West Cork men who made his living in tights.

Danno had a vast army of admirers. And a legion of sworn enemies. Their black ranks included Ed "Strangler" Lewis, Steve "Crusher" Casey, Bronko "The Red Menace" Nagurski, Chief Little Wolf and The Infamous Flying Dusek Brothers.

All had sworn to defeat Danno. Some reckoned they did. But while the big man was often floored, Danno always rose from the canvas, puffed out his massive chest, danced forward and executed his killer move - the Irish Whip.

He was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Pro-Wrestling - a time when Grunt n'Grapple was as big as boxing and taken (almost) as seriously. It was the great American Blue-Collar past-time - and Danno, the handsome farm-boy from West Cork - was one of it's biggest names.

On April 26, 1935, just months after Danno had swapped an Irish army camp for the life of a sports-star in the US, he faced Ed "Strangler" Lewis at the Boston Garden in front of 20,000 wildly cheering fans. Danno won the first fall after twenty minutes of grunting, groaning and grappling with his signature Irish Whip.

But Strangler, in a red rage, rose and threw Danno from the ring. Ten Boston-Irish cops tried to stop Danno, blood streaming from a cut above his eyes, from getting back in to murder the Strangler.

The Irishman hurled them aside, leapt over the ropes and executed a fall so hard, the Strangler was laid out unconscious on the canvas. Danno was pro-Wrestling's World Heavyweight Champ.

The Boston Globe called it a "thrilling match with a great climax".

Danno sailed back to his native shore, arriving in Cobh on a transatlantic liner to a huge reception, caught on newsreel and shown around the world.

Danno was born on a farm outside the West Cork village of Ballydehob in September, 1912. His father, Big Dan, was (as the name might suggest) a mountain of a man, 6'5'' and almost as wide, a famous sportsman in the locality.

Young Danno left school at 13, worked on the family farm and then joined the Irish Army. He quickly became a star athlete, setting several national records in strength events, including an Army record for the hammer-throw that wouldn't be broken until 1990.

Professional wrestling was a huge sport at the time, in the US but also in Europe. When the legendary promoter Paul Bowser decided he needed a new star - and an Irish one to get in the huge, East Coast Irish-American crowds - he approached the famous Irish Olympian (and 1928 Hammer Gold Medallist) Pat O'Callaghan with an offer. O'Callaghan, a qualified doctor, turned him down. But he did recommend a fellow Corkman, a private in the Irish Army who could "fit the bill", the young giant Danno.

Bowser used his connections with Boston Irish politicians to get Danno "excused" from the Irish Army (it's said the Boston Police chief wrote a personal letter to the Irish Minister for Defence, Frank Aitken) and the Cork kid was soon on a boat heading for London, to actually learn how to wrestle with one of Bowser's English contacts..

When Bowser finally met with Danno in New York, he realised that in the huge, handsome Irishman with the charismatic smile, he had hit gold.

On January 2, 1935, after a rough Atlantic crossing and a smoother ride from New York to Boston in a private plane, the kid who had recently been an Irish Army private on eight quid a week signed a five year, pro-Wrestling contract said to be worth $100,000 dollars.

Danno In Scary Pose 

The West Cork boy was living in one of Boston's finest hotels, eating steaks and training every day, ready for his big professional debut in the Boston Garden.

Pro-wrestling was then, as it is now, "sport entertainment".Wrestlers had clearly defined personae, they were mostly either Heroes or Heels, they represented immigrant groups or crude racial stereotypes. Danno O'Mahoney (the promoters added an "e" to his surname) would be a champion of the blue-collar East Coast Irish, the Gorgeous Gael, the kind of wrestler you could take home to meet your mother.



He was wildly successful over a short period of time, regularly wrestling in front of crowds of 20,000 or more. It was the first Golden Age of Pro Wrestling, when the biggest stars were household names across Europe and the US and newsreel cameras brought the latest big bouts into the cinemas.

One of his first bouts, against the hated "Heel" Ernie Dusek at the Boston Garden on Jan 5 1935 drew a crowd of 20,000. The local papers said "at least of 14,000 of these were screaming Irishmen, out to support their boy". Danno seemed to freeze at first, hardly surprising given that a few months earlier he had been a private on a remote Irish Army camp who had never really wrestled in his life.

However, after a few hesitant rounds, Danno gave the Irish crowd what they wanted - using his patented "finishing move" the Irish Whip. This move, still seen in pro-wrestling today, involves catching your opponent by his outstretched arm and using his own momentum to "whip" him into the ropes, ready to be clotheslined on the rebound.

Ernie Dusek got laid out. Which was too much for his cornerman and brother Rudy, who jumped into the ring and attacked Danno. Then Ernie got off the canvass and joined his brother. Danno responded by "punching everything that moved" including the ref (Sam Smith) and the Boston police who were usually on good money from the promoters and could always be guaranteed to join in the fun/mayhem.

"Danno threw punches at the police, as the crowd roared their approval" was how one local paper reported it. Danno was eventually crowned champ and the huge crowd went home happy. It was Friday night entertainment, they got to see the giant Irish lad lay into the cops and beat the Duseks.  Boston had a new hero.

Danno had a brief but glittering career, was World Champion several times - but in pro-Wrestling, such titles were always contested by rival organisations and the behind the scenes strokes and fixing meant that careers could be made and destroyed very quickly.

Perhaps his greatest occasion was a title unification fight with rival Ed Don George on July 30th, 1935, a match that drew over 40,000 fans (including Massachusetts Gov James M Curley) to the Braves Field Baseball Park. The gate was reported to be $60,000 dollars.

However, the bout had a very poor finish, the crowd were unhappy and the press started to turn on the promoters who were so obviously fixing fights and carving out monopolies.

Danno also had visa problems which affected his career. He married, moved to Los Angeles, opened a restaurant and then joined the US Army during WWII.

After the war, he decided to move back to Ireland and his native West Cork for good. But in 1950, at the age of just 38, and only a couple of months after returning home, Danno O'Mahony died from injuries sustained in a car crash.

He was hugely, briefly famous across the US and Ireland. Today, he is still remembered in his home town, where there is a statue of him standing at the crossroads as you drive in from the Cork City side.

From West Cork fields to performing in front of tens of thousands across the US, Danno O'Mahony had pro-Wrestling to thank for a life less ordinary.

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